The Life Aquatic
Listening to: Call To Love - Crooked Fingers
As a kid I dreamt of living in a house under the sea (I know! How surprising!).
Knowing that reaching this goal would take quite an effort I did a lot of research
(I also convinced my parents to pony up for dive lessons… but that’s another story,
one involving a woman’s wet suit). One of my primary sources of data was Cousteau and
his adventures. I devoured his writing like I did ice cream. So you can imagine the
delight I got from Wes Andersons The
Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.
The Life Aqautic is the story of Steve Zissou and his desire to track down the
Jaguar Shark that killed his side kick. I have read a lot of reviews that suggest
that the movie was little more than a re-imaging of The
Royal Tenenbaums. But I don’t agree, well not completely. Sure you’ve got the
rather worn out and not particularly likable paternal figure and the dysfunctional
family, but The Life Aquatic goes in a different direction… The Life Aquatic seems
to be more of a homage to old school exploration than a treatise on families (though
it does deal with this theme a lot). The Life Aquatic is a lot more fun, though less
darkly humorous, than Tenenbaums and Bill Murray is the obvious contributor to this.
For me the real highlights (other than Andersons delicious melancholy and delightful
left-of-centre rendition of reality) were the creatures (my personal fav was
the Crayon Pony Fish) and the annoying-until-you-can-work-it-out but very, very, trippy
rendition of David Bowie songs in Portuguese.
Not as good as the Tenebaums… but great fun none-the-less.
And hey… I’ve started tracking down the Cousteau books again 
UPDATE: Thanks to the Great Crap Net in the Sky aka eBay I am now the owner of four Cousteau books circa
1974.
